How To Influence Behavior

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Want somebody to do something for you? (Like vote?) Keep the message simple.

As Obama showed us, if you want to persuade people to do something, you have to keep it simple and iterate, iterate, iterate.

Most business today is about influencing behavior, whether among buyers, employees, investors, or any other group a business touches.

So doesn’t it seem strange that in all our scheming and planning and executing, we don’t aim at exactly what we want – changing behavior positively?

Well, Dr. B.J. Fogg, director of the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab, is here to help. Dr. Fogg – no name jokes please – has been changing behavior for 15 years.  Here is his prescription for how to change behavior in the modern world:

1. Choose a simple behavior to target. Dr. Fogg suggests you keep it as simple as possible, which means you may have to reduce the grand goals to a step by step process of simple behaviors.

2. Learn what is preventing the target behavior. This is invariably lack of motivation, lack of ability or lack of a well-timed trigger to perform the behavior.

3. Choose the right channel. The delivery method of persuasion should match the target behavior and the audience. If it’s something that can be done online, then use online.

4. Start small and fast. Instead of spending forever planning a strategy and tactics, just start doing it, test the results, and then try again. Many tools today allow you to continually iterate.

5. Build on small successes. Instead of looking for the big win, continue the keep-it-simple thinking.  When a simple solution succeeds, the door is open for other steps. Together  such steps can have quite an impact.